Health briefs

Replace soda, juice to cut diabetes risk

Simply drinking more water doesn't seem to cut risk of diabetes but replacing juice or soda with it does, a study has found. (Dorling Kindersley, Getty Images)

Women who chose plain water over sweet drinks such as sodas or fruit juice had a slightly lowered risk of developing diabetes, a large new study has found.

The results, based on more than 80,000 women followed for more than a decade, suggest that adding water to the sugary beverages a person drinks throughout the day won't make a difference but that replacing sweet drinks with water could help stave off the metabolic disorder.

"It is essentially not that water helps, except with hydration, but that the others hurt," said Barry Popkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health who was not involved in the study.

It's well-established that sugary beverages can increase diabetes risk, said Dr. Frank Hu, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the study's author.

People have recommended drinking plain water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages, he said, "and the question is whether this kind of substitution has any impact on diabetes."

Hu and his colleagues collected data from the massive Nurses Health Study, which tracked the health and lifestyle of tens of thousands of women across the U.S. The new study included 82,902 women who answered questions about their diet and health over a 12-year span.

Over time, about 2,700 of them developed diabetes.

The amount of water women drank didn't seem to influence their diabetes risk. Those who drank more than six cups a day had the same risk as women who drank less than one cup a day.

But sugar-sweetened drinks and fruit juice were tied to a higher risk of diabetes — about 10 percent higher for each cup consumed each day.

The research team estimated that if women replaced one cup of soda or juice with one cup of plain water, their diabetes risk would fall by 7 or 8 percent.

While it's not a huge reduction in the risk, "because diabetes is so prevalent in our society, even (a) 7 or 8 percent reduction in diabetes risk is quite substantial in terms of the population," Hu said.

About 10 percent of women, or 12.6 million, have diabetes in the United States.

A 7 percent reduction would mean that instead of 10 out of every 100 women having diabetes, the number would be closer to 9 in 100.

Hu's study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also found that unsweetened coffee or tea might be good alternatives to sugary beverages.

The researchers estimated that replacing one cup of soda or fruit juice with one cup of coffee or tea could reduce the risk of developing diabetes by 12 to 17 percent.

Transplants of healthy skin from a patient's own body can improve discoloration caused by vitiligonih, researchers from the Henry Ford Health Systemwebsite in Detroit reported.

The procedure was developed in Saudi Arabia, and the Ford researchers are the first U.S. team to attempt it, said Dr. Iltefat Hamzavi, a Ford dermatologist. Although the study involved only about 30 patients, the pilot trial suggests that the procedure could be beneficial to many patients, he said.

Vitiligo is a disease that occurs when the body's immune system kills cells called melanocytes in the skin. Melanocytes produce brown pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. When they are killed, the skin turns white, producing white patches that vary in size and location.

The white patches are most noticeable, for obvious reasons, in blacks and other people of color. About 1 percent of the world's population is thought to suffer from it. One of the best known victims of the disorder was singer Michael Jackson.

Vitiligo is often treated with phototherapy and steroid creams, but none of the treatments are is particularly effective. Some patients attempt to bleach the rest of their skin to a lighter color to make the disease less obvious.

The researchers reported in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatologywebsite that, on average, the treated areas regained about 43 percent of their color within six months. In patients with localized vitiligo, the treated areas regained about 68 percent of their natural color.

Poppies' medicinal properties unlocked

Scientists have unraveled exactly how opium poppies produce a nonaddictive compound that can both suppress coughs and kill tumor cells, paving the way for improved production of the medicine.

Opium poppies, the source of heroin, are also important for producing medical painkillers such as morphine and codeine, along with noscapinenih.gov, which has been used for decades as a cough suppressant.

More recently, researchers have found noscapine is also a potent anti-cancer agent, prompting clinical tests into its role in fighting blood cancer.

The discovery that a cluster of 10 genes is responsible for the synthesis of noscapine inside the poppies means plant breeders can now develop high-yielding varieties. It may also help scientists in future produce the drug in factories.

The findings by researchers at the University of York and GlaxoSmithKline were published on Thursday in the journal Science.

British-based GlaxoSmithKline is a leading producer of opium-based ingredients, supplying around 20 percent of the world's medicinal opiate needs from poppies grown by farmers in Tasmania.